Exhibition “Salvador Dali. Surrealist and classic" at the Faberge Museum

The Faberge Museum hosts the exhibition “Salvador Dali. Surrealist and Classic”, for the first time in St. Petersburg such a large-scale exposition, including more than 150 paintings and graphic works by Dali.

One of the central works of the upcoming exhibition is Landscape with Enigmatic Elements, which the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation purchased in 2011 for 7.8 million euros from a private collector who wished to remain anonymous.

The exhibition allows you to trace the artist's creative path, from the surrealist works of the 1930s that made him famous to his appeals to the subjects of classical European art in the 1980s. Particular emphasis is placed on Salvador Dali's comprehension of the heritage of the geniuses of the Italian Renaissance - Michelangelo and Cellini, as well as Dante's "Divine Comedy".

Salvador Dali, one of the main artists who determined the development of the art of the 20th century, was infinitely paradoxical, like the 20th century itself. Instantly recognizable and unlike anyone else, he forever entered not only the history of fine art, but also the history of design, fashion, theater, cinema and literature. He managed to reflect in his work almost all the great ideas and contradictions of his time. The exhibition at the Faberge Museum provides an opportunity to touch the wonderful diversity of Dali's work, and to feel the inner relationship of modernism and classics, contained in his works.

The earliest works presented at the exhibition are surreal landscapes from 1934-1937. Dali depicts the desert landscapes of Ampurdana and introduces various figures and elements into them. Their mysterious combinations are reminiscent of dreams, and perhaps reveal to us the content of the unconscious artist, which he, through his “paranoid-critical method”, frees from the yoke of logic and reason and transfers to painting.

The exhibition will feature one of the most interesting works of this period, Landscape with Enigmatic Elements (1934), a recent and record-breaking acquisition by the Salvador Dalí Gala Foundation, purchased from a private collector in 2011. In this work, Dali originally quotes the famous masterpiece "The Art of Painting" by Vermeer. Dali admired the personality and work of the Dutch painter throughout his life, put him in first place in his scandalous comparative table of the importance of artists and even called him a "comprehensive surrealist." Paying tribute to his "mentor", Dali often depicted Vermeer in his paintings.

So in the "Landscape with mysterious elements" he places him in the foreground of the Ampurdan Valley, permeated with amazing, unearthly light, and himself, still a child, dressed in a sailor's costume, accompanied by a nanny - somewhere far away. Fragments of reality - the sky, cypresses, the ideal Ampurdan village of Portlligat - side by side in the picture with ghosts, shadows and fantastic nameless forms, giving the widest field for interpretation.

These and other iconic surrealistic images will continue to appear constantly in Dali's work, but over time they will begin to change their meaning. In the painting “In Search of the Fourth Dimension”, painted much later, in 1979, during the artist’s active experiments with stereoscopic and holographic images, which can help find the third and fourth dimensions, and therefore, according to Dali’s logic, allow us to gain immortality, we again see its symbolism is white tunics, bread, cypresses, soft watches, but in a completely different context. In an attempt to unite space and time, Dali combines his own imagery with quotations from the canonical works of the Renaissance - Raphael's The School of Athens and Perugino's Handing over the Keys to the Apostle Peter. However, in itself, interest in classical European painting appears in Dali much earlier.

Immediately after his break with the surrealists and further, in the early 1940s, Dali proclaims a return to classicism and defends the values of the Renaissance. The broad intellectual and creative interests of the artist do not fit into any of the current trends of that time, and really remind of the humanism of the Renaissance. In 1945, he creates a series of illustrations for the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, one of the most famous representatives of the Florentine Renaissance. Dali freely interprets Cellini's text, providing maximum opportunities for his imagination. These illustrations, done in watercolor and ink on paper, will be shown at an exhibition at the Faberge Museum.

Another large-scale project of Dali, aimed at comprehending the monuments of classical European art and literature, is his series of illustrations for the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, commissioned to him on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of Dante by the State Polygraphic Institute of Italy. Dali began this work in 1950 in the coastal village of Cadaqués and completed it two years later with 102 illustrations in various techniques, using watercolor, gouache, sanguine and ink. Between 1959 and 1963, 100 of them were reproduced in photogravure technique. All 100 illustrations included in the final series, which have now become textbooks, can be seen at the exhibition.

The exhibition will also feature paintings by Salvador Dali in the early 1980s and dedicated to another great Renaissance master, Michelangelo Buonarotti. Working with the subjects of Michelangelo, Dali shows great respect for tradition and the past, but at the same time does not hide his desire to surpass them through constant innovation and immersion in modernity.

Several of these works were shown to the public for the first time only last year at a thematic exhibition in Italy, and they will come to Russia for the first time. These works lift the veil over the little-studied last years of Dali's life. The death of his only and dearly beloved wife and muse Gala (Elena Dyakonova) in June 1982 becomes a strong blow for him and makes him think more and more about the other life. Dali has a passionate interest in the theme of immortality and writes a number of works in which he interprets the classical images of Michelangelo with the same irrepressible fantasy characteristic of him.

In the famous work “Geological Echo. Pieta (1982) Dali embeds the figures of the Virgin Mary and Christ in the rocky landscape of the Gulf of Cadaqués, as if trying to find the divine in the earthly. And in a kind of artistic testament "Based on Michelangelo's Head of Giuliano Medici" (1982), the artist combines all the symbols and techniques characteristic of him at different stages - the beauty of the classical profile, a mysterious, surreal landscape filled with strange figures, uses the effect of optical illusion, as if summing up your creative endeavors.

He also creates a whole series of works in which the images of the Medici Tomb, decorating the chapel of the dynasty of the main patrons of the Renaissance, become a majestic memorial for Gala and himself and grant them immortality, at least in the dimension of world art.

Working mode:

daily from April 1 to July 2, 2017 from 10:00 to 20:45.

Ticket price:

full - 450 rubles,
preferential - 200 rubles.

Exhibition “Salvador Dali. Surrealist and classic. Recommended for visitors over 18 years of age.

Ticket presale is open. For all questions [email protected]

Where: Faberge Museum, St. Petersburg

“Surrealism is me,” with this famous phrase, Dali broke with Andre Breton and the surrealists in 1936, becoming the personification of this trend in art during his lifetime. "Greedy for dollars", he turned his name into a brand, becoming a kind of pop star from painting. Dali's works are regularly exhibited in the largest museums of the world, showing the Spanish master either as a painter or as an illustrator of fashion magazines. This time the Dali exhibition will be held at the Faberge Museum in St. Petersburg. First of all, it is dedicated to how Dali mastered the heritage of Italian Renaissance artists. The exhibition was curated by Monse Ager, director of the Dali Museums of the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation, and Thomas Clement Salomon, researcher at Mondo Mostre. They shared with us how the work on the concept and creation of the exposition at the Faberge Museum went.

“The exhibition has nothing to do with previous projects, we wanted to show Dali’s late legacy and delve into an important iconographic element – the landscape. At the same time, we wanted to present Dali in a completely new way, weak and sick, but not losing the desire to create.”

Salvador Dali, "Landscape with mysterious elements", 1934

The Italian theme in Dali's work was first considered at an exhibition held earlier this year at the Palazzo Blu in Pisa. Asked what unites the two exhibitions, Monse Ager replies: “The idea itself united both projects, but in St. Petersburg we wanted to emphasize the surrealist period and the presence of landscape throughout his artistic career.” The conversation about this particular genre is not accidental - the exhibition will feature "Landscape with mysterious elements", acquired by the foundation in 2011 from a private collector. Unlike other works where the artist depicted the Catalan valley of Ampurdan, here Dali refers to the work of Jan Vermeer "The Art of Painting", better known as the "Artist's Studio". Rethinking the art of the old masters was as normal for Dali as painting his own paintings - such works include Goya's Caprichos, Michelangelo's Pieta, and illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy. But why is Vermeer so important? Ager answers this question with a quote from the artist's own book "50 Magic Secrets of Mastery", where he directly states that he is ready to lose his left hand, just to see Vermeer for ten minutes at the easel.

"Dali considered Vermeer one of the greatest masters, he praised his skill, inspiration, drawing, color and authenticity of his work."

Salvador Dali, "Inspired by„ Heads of Giuliano de' Medici“ Michelangelo", 1982. Salvador Dali, 1969. Photo:Gianni Ferrari / Cover / Getty Images

However, Vermeer was not the only artist whose talent inspired Dali. Among the 150 works, from earlier paintings of the 30s to late works of the 80s, there are paintings that refer to Michelangelo, Cellini, Raphael, Perugino. Art historians, critics and audiences continue to wonder why even the most avant-garde artists of the 20th century never stopped turning to the classical masters.

“Totally modern, the artist Dali wanted to belong both to tradition and to the past at the same time. He was impressed by the old masters, the way they simultaneously show the reality from the outside and from the inside.

The earliest works of this kind appear already after the break with the surrealists in the 40s: in 1945 he created illustrations for the autobiography of the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, and in the 50s he illustrated Dante's Divine Comedy in honor of the poet's 700th birthday. The illustrations, which later became textbooks, showed the main poem of the Renaissance through the eyes of our contemporary era.

Salvador Dali, Geological Echo. Pieta, 1982

Dali's appeal to Italian art in the 80s after the death of his beloved and muse Gala becomes completely different. The works are filled with melancholy, the colors change, the strokes become coarser, and the love of painting is as important as the struggle to keep painting. During these years, Dali turns to Michelangelo, who has been important to him since his youth. Michelangelo, like Dali himself, is an example of a versatile artist who is able to cover many disciplines.

Dali wants to become immortal and therefore relies on science, where he finds answers to eternal questions . In the work “Geological Echo. Pieta (1982), he places the familiar sculptures of Michelangelo in the rocky landscape of Cadaqués, combining the divine and the earthly essence and bringing his own innovation to the traditional plot. The canvas “Based on Michelangelo’s Head of Giuliano Medici” (1981) he presents as his own artistic testament, where he combines the lyrical profile of the Renaissance hero and the elements characteristic of Dali’s painting. A rocky landscape with strange characters and the effect of an optical perspective takes the viewer into a different reality that opens up behind the image of the Medici.

Dali devoted a separate series to the famous Medici tomb, one of the main sculptural works of Michelangelo, thereby reflecting on immortality for himself and Gala. When asked why the public never loses interest in Dali's work, Monse Ager replies: “For his combination of traditional and revolutionary, he went far beyond art, thanks in large part to his significant knowledge of art history. For his ability to provoke the audience, as well as for creating such a recognizable character. Now he has become a classic, like the masters of the past. If the name of the greatest surrealist still remains synonymous with hypocrisy and swindle for you, maybe it's time to take a fresh look at his work through the master's appeal to the great classics? The era of surrealism is far behind, and although the name of Dali does not set auction records among modernist artists, it does not leave the posters of museum exhibitions. Each new exposition brings one closer to the possibility of understanding Dali - not terrible and great, but beyond the limits of art and human life itself.

More than 150 paintings and graphic works by Dali will be shown in the private Faberge Museum in St. Petersburg

Faberge Museum
April 1 – July 2, 2017
St. Petersburg, embankment of the Fontanka River, 21

Exhibition entitled “Salvador Dali. Surrealist and Classic” will open at the Faberge Museum on March 31, 2017. Tickets can already be bought online for dates from April 1 to May 15 on the museum's website. Tickets for a later visit to the exhibition will go on sale April 10.

This will be the first such large-scale exhibition of Salvador Dali in St. Petersburg: more than 150 paintings and graphic works from the collection of the Gala - Salvador Dali Foundation in Figueres (Catalonia, Spain), as well as from other museum and private collections. The artist's creative path can be traced from the surrealist works of the 1930s, which brought Dali fame, to his appeals in the 1980s to the subjects of classical European art. Particular emphasis is placed on Salvador Dali's comprehension of the heritage of the geniuses of the Italian Renaissance - Michelangelo and Cellini, as well as Dante's "Divine Comedy".

The exhibition will feature one of the most interesting works of this period - "Landscape with mysterious elements" (1934) - a recent and record-breaking acquisition of the Gala - Salvador Dali Foundation (the painting was bought from a private collector in 2011). In this work, Dali originally quotes the famous masterpiece "The Art of Painting" by Vermeer. Dali admired the personality and work of the Dutch painter throughout his life, put him in first place in his scandalous comparative table of the importance of artists and even called him a "comprehensive surrealist." Paying tribute to his "mentor", Dali often depicted Vermeer in his paintings. So in “Landscape with mysterious elements”, he places him in the foreground of the Ampurdan Valley, permeated with amazing, unearthly light, and himself, still a child, dressed in a sailor’s costume, accompanied by a nanny, is somewhere far away. Fragments of reality - the sky, cypresses, the ideal Ampurdan village of Portlligat - side by side in the picture with ghosts, shadows and fantastic nameless forms, giving the widest field for interpretation.

These and other iconic surrealistic images will continue to appear constantly in Dali's work, but over time they will begin to change their meaning. In the painting “In Search of the Fourth Dimension”, painted much later, in 1979 (during the period of the artist’s active experiments with stereoscopic and holographic images, which can help find the third and fourth dimensions, and therefore, according to Dali’s logic, allow us to gain immortality), we we again see its symbolism - white tunics, bread, cypresses, soft watches, but in a completely different context. In an attempt to unite space and time, Dali combines his own imagery with quotations from the canonical works of the Renaissance - Raphael's The School of Athens and Perugino's Handing over the Keys to the Apostle Peter. However, in itself, interest in classical European painting appears in Dali much earlier.

Immediately after his break with the Surrealists and further, in the early 1940s, Dali proclaims a return to classicism and advocates the values of the Renaissance. The wide intellectual and creative interests of the artist do not fit into any of the currents of that time and really remind of the humanism of the Renaissance. In 1945, he creates a series of illustrations for the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, one of the most famous representatives of the Florentine Renaissance. Dali freely interprets Cellini's text, providing maximum opportunities for his imagination. These illustrations, done in watercolor and ink on paper, will be shown at an exhibition at the Faberge Museum.

Another large-scale project of Dali, aimed at comprehending the monuments of classical European art and literature, is his series of illustrations for the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, commissioned to him on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of Dante by the State Polygraphic Institute of Italy. Dali began this work in 1950 in the coastal village of Cadaqués and completed it two years later, completing 102 illustrations in various techniques - watercolor, gouache, sanguine and ink. Between 1959 and 1963, 100 of them were reproduced using the photogravure technique. All 100 illustrations included in the final series, which have now become textbooks, can be seen at the exhibition.

The exhibition will feature paintings made by Salvador Dali in the early 1980s and dedicated to another great master of the Renaissance - Michelangelo Buonarotti. Working with the subjects of Michelangelo, Dali shows great respect for tradition and the past, but at the same time does not hide his desire to surpass them through constant innovation and immersion in modernity. Some of these works were shown to the public for the first time only last year at a thematic exhibition in Italy, and they will come to Russia for the first time. These works lift the veil over the little-studied last years of Dali's life. The death of his only and dearly beloved wife and muse Gala (Elena Dyakonova) in June 1982 becomes a strong blow for him and makes him think more and more about the other world. Dali has a passionate interest in the theme of immortality and writes a number of works in which he interprets the classical images of Michelangelo with the same irrepressible fantasy characteristic of him. In the famous work “Geological Echo. Pieta (1982) Dali embeds the figures of the Virgin Mary and Christ in the rocky landscape of the Gulf of Cadaqués, as if trying to find the divine in the earthly. And in a kind of artistic testament “Based on Michelangelo’s “Head of Giuliano Medici”” (1982), the artist combines all the symbols and techniques characteristic of him at different stages: the beauty of the classical profile, a mysterious, surreal landscape filled with strange figures, uses the effect of optical illusion, as if summing up your creative endeavors. He also creates a whole series of works in which the images of the Medici Tomb, decorating the chapel of the dynasty of the main patrons of the Renaissance, become a majestic memorial for Gala and himself and grant them immortality, at least in the dimension of world art.

From April 1 to July 2, the Faberge Museum in St. Petersburg will host the exhibition “Salvador Dali. Surrealist and classic. For the museum, this is the second notable project created jointly with foreign institutions and their curators after last year's sensational Frida Kahlo.

This time, 145 works from museums and private collections were brought to St. Petersburg, including 25 paintings and several graphic series, and the Spanish curators built the exposition around classical motifs and borrowings from Dali's works. The retrospective itself cannot be called such an unprecedented case: the Gala - Salvador Dali Foundation, which organizes it, is known for its activity, regularly opens exhibitions and even representative museums around the world and, frankly, is overly commercialized. Nevertheless, it is worth seeing the project, albeit in order to finally be disappointed in the main poseur and imitator of the twentieth century.

For the opening of the exhibition, The Village has prepared a compact guide based on the key exhibits that the audience will see.

Surrealist

The earliest works at the exhibition are dated 1934 - a landmark year in Dali's life. It was in 1934 that he unofficially married Gala, a native of Kazan, Elena Dyakonova, who by that time had managed to be the wife of the French poet Paul Eluard and the mistress of Max Ernst. Behind Dali are early experiments with cubism and Dadaism that did not end in anything, acquaintance with Picasso, Juan Miro and, most importantly, Andre Breton, the founder of the Surrealist group, which Dali joined in 1929 in order to quarrel a few years later (formally on the basis of relations to Franco's policy) and break off all relations.

Dali is still fascinated by the Freudian teachings and creates his canvases with a clear eye on him. So, in “Landscape with mysterious elements”, he combines the real and the imaginary: in the scenery of a typical Ampurdan landscape with cypresses and desert fields leaving the horizon line, he depicts Vermeer sitting at an easel and himself in the form of a child in a sailor suit walking with a nanny.

"Landscape with mysterious elements", 1934. Wood, oil. Collection of the Gala - Salvador Dali Foundation, Figueres

art savior

In 1937, Dali visited Italy and, impressed by the works of the Renaissance, gradually abandoned experiments with the proportions of the human body, trying to return to the correct academic drawing. Dali contrasts himself (at least in words) with modernists, and later even declares himself a savior from degradation in art, comparing his work with the work of Picasso and stating that he “does not deal with beauty, but with ugliness.”

Formerly focused mostly on contemporaries, now he thinks of himself as a Renaissance master, and chooses Benvenuto Cellini, a Florentine sculptor, jeweler and artist, as a role model. In 1940, having fled the war in the United States, Dali tried himself as a decorator and jeweler, and, like Cellini, published his own autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali. In 1945, Doubleday & Company even commissioned the artist to create a series of illustrations for a new English edition of the book "The life of Benvenuto Cellini, written by himself." After American newspapers call Dali "Benvenuto Cellini of the twentieth century", which flatters him very much.

Hero of gloss and media

"Woman with a butterfly", 1958. Plexiglas, oil. Private collection

"Black devil. Hell. Canto 21, illustration for The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, 1959-1963. Foundation "Gala - Salvador Dali"

Mystic

In 1949, Pope Pius XII received the artist in the Vatican. And some time later, the Italian State Institute of Printing ordered Dali illustrations for a new edition of the Divine Comedy, timed to coincide with the 700th anniversary of the birth of Dante. In May 1954, an exhibition is held at the Palazzo Pallavicini in Rome. Dali appears on it from a metaphysical cube, depicting a creative revival, and declares himself a mystic who has renounced his atheistic past. The spectacular performance, however, does not convince anyone - the press and critics begin to scold Dali, accusing him of pornography and inability to understand the idea of the poem. As a result, the Press Institute terminated the contract with the artist and refused to publish the book, but later, in 1960, it was released in Paris thanks to the participation of the French publisher Joseph Fauré.

As for the illustrations themselves, Dali actively quotes the classics, primarily Sandro Botticelli, for example, being inspired by Venus from his painting “Spring” when depicting Beatrice.

pop artist

The last notable works of Dali are dated 1982-1983, after which the artist is no longer engaged in painting. In 1982, Gala dies, at which time Dali enthusiastically interprets the works of Michelangelo. The preparatory part is done by assistants who copy frescoes and images of sculptures from photographs or postcards onto canvas. In fact, Dali here resorts to the pop art method, using the finished image, only with the help of background elements and colors, giving it a recognizable author's style.

The key work here is “Geological Echo. Pieta", in which the artist reworked the famous sculpture by Michelangelo, kept in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Dali places the Madonna with the lifeless body of Christ in her arms in a desert landscape with rocks, which, according to experts, resemble the reef of Es Koukurukuk in Cadaqués, the very city in which Dali was first introduced to modern art as a child. The main motive of this period is death, the main color is gray.

Geological echo. Pieta, 1982. Canvas, oil. Collection of the Gala - Salvador Dali Foundation, Figueres

IMAGES: Faberge Museum